DANCE REVIEW : Unexpected Premiere by Joffrey

Fans of choreographer Gerald Arpino were in for a triple disappointment at the Joffrey Ballet’s Sunday matinee performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The scheduled three Arpino ballets--”Round of Angels,” “Trinity” and “L’Air d’Esprit”--had been removed from the program after a company meeting on Saturday.

Arpino, the company’s co-founder and artistic director, quit the Joffrey last week partially in reaction to a recent streamlining of the company’s management structure--and took his ballets with him.

Harold Messing, Arpino’s attorney, has enjoined the Joffrey from performing any of the choreographer’s works.

Negotiations continue between Arpino and the Joffrey Ballet Foundation, with lawyerly wrangling centering on whether the works belong to Arpino or to the company for which he might or might not be considered an employee. Meanwhile, the company is replacing Arpino repertory with ballets by other choreographers, a state of affairs that will continue at least through the Wednesday night performance, according to a company announcement.

In place of the missing Arpinos on Sunday, the Joffrey offered an early look at a Los Angeles premiere that wasn’t supposed to be unveiled until Wednesday--company dancer Edward Stierle’s “Lacrymosa”--and Paul Taylor’s “Arden Court,” a work the company is dancing elsewhere this season but hadn’t planned to perform during the current, local four-week engagement. Both works were performed to taped accompaniment.

“Lacrymosa,” set to seven taped sections from Mozart’s Requiem, is very much a young man’s work. Intense and earnest, it takes itself very seriously. The subject is grief and letting go of the dead, and the piece--an expanded version of a work created for a Joffrey II workshop in 1988--is dedicated to the memory of company founder Robert Joffrey.

The 22-year-old Stierle has given himself a role by turns pensively immobile and frenetically, virtuosically anguished.

The subject of his sorrow and desperation is a fiercely majestic woman in a matte black dress dusted with twinkling paillettes (Jodie Gates). She has fallen into the clutches of a stalking, black-garbed personification of Death (Daniel Baudendistel), a fellow whose lurking possessiveness is somewhat reminiscent of the evil Rotbart in “Swan Lake.”

Although he seems overly in thrall to Arpino’s endless lifts and formless convoys of dancers running on and off-stage for no good reason, Stierle has found some promising ways to personalize his ensemble choreography. The softly curved arms of both men and women, for example, offer a welcome, unisex delicacy of gesture.

Opening on a high key, the work suffers from being unable to extend and enlarge its aura of suffering without straining heavily at the bit. Stierle himself brings enormous conviction to runs and fetal body curls, taut jetes and a heroic slow split, palms clasped in air.

In the end, there is not nearly enough substance here to measure up to the stately glories of Mozart’s final work. And yet Stierle’s emotional honesty and noble ambition suggest a choreographic sensibility worth future attention.

“Arden Court” received its customary fleet, smooth-edged treatment by the Joffrey. Linda Bechtold was a quicksilver charmer, climbing and dodging Tyler Walters’ body with mischievous delight in its unexpected footholds and hiding places. The spirit of wonder built into this piece, with its many passages of dancing closely observed by other dancers, tends to be slighted.

Similarly, these balletic bodies don’t convey the weighted, slightly off-center movements characteristic of the men in Taylor’s original modern dance cast. Yet the speed and finesse are dazzling.

Eugene Loring’s “Billy the Kid,” retained from the original Sunday program, was performed with Douglas Martin in the title role, Tyler Walters as Pat Garrett--both previously reviewed--and Beatriz Rodriguez as the subdued and wraith-like Sweetheart.